Striving to achieve a dream is never a waste of time.

The paths that we choose don't always take us where we want to go. Sometimes they take us where we need to go.

If Wells recognized any merit in [Henry] James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. p. 516

Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?

Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act.

The most terrifying thing is sometimes not what we see, but rather what we are forced to imagine.

We are the authors of our own fate-we write it each day with every one of our actions.